RIPENING
SEASONS

Issue #34, November 1999

My 20th Century Roll of Remembrance

Actually,
I'm a bit surprised at having made it to the millennium. Although
I set my sights on age 84 as a lifetime measure, quite a few years
ago, there's little indication that my family genes are worth
betting on. Besides which, I've led such a fractious life that
longevity seemed hardly in the cards. Even were I a cat, I've
probably used up my nine.

Let's see &endash; a sickly kid, with a
congenital heart murmur and something called a mega-colon that was
supposed to have surgical intervention if I were to live into
adulthood (which it didn't &endash; but what did they know, in
those days?); a bout with TB in my early 20s; close to being
killed in a small aircraft, earlier than that; several potentially
deadly auto accidents before I reached 30; one or two bicycle
no-brainers (in the worst sense of the term); and then the
ruptured bowel, at 47, which very nearly did do me in . .
.

I don't even have to speculate on the hazards
of my open-road and otherwise insecure more recent years, I really
think I am a walking wonder! Which only goes to show that such
things don't come under the "laws of chance" or statistical
probability. In the end, we have very individualized fields to
plow, and time granted for doing it.

But one of the dubious blessings of such
inscrutable circumstances is that we suffer a greater accumulation
of griefs, for those in our crowd who die ahead of us regardless
of their age and often of their seeming good health and bright
prospects. The blessing, of course, is that it never allows us to
take life for granted, to get complacent about it. And I feel a
kind of gratitude to those who have provided me this constancy of
awareness.

With the millennial threshold at hand, I see a
small way to return the gift. The 20th Century is about to fade
toward insignificance, and everything that was in or of it. A
normal progression, to be sure, be there a marker line or not; but
the demarcation gives me a prompt and a process, to pay some
individual homage to all of those whom I knew, who didn't live to
see this awesome moment. By doing so, in even such a small
publication headed for a website, I bring their names, and a bit
of tribute to them, forward into the 21st Century. For many of
them, I'm sure, it will be the only remnant to outlast the
memories of those who knew them. A tiny thrust toward immortality
that I can provide.

I want, therefore, to devote the main part of
this issue to a reflection on how I have known these folks and
what they brought into my life. The extent of my selection is
limited for space, and my tribute relies largely on memory, so
please understand if you think it calls for correction or
addition. There is always the likelihood that you knew someone
better, or differently, than I. But I would surely appreciate
hearing of anyone I've left out &endash; perhaps an old friend
whose departure I didn't even know about!

These, however, are the ones I choose to
memorialize, presented in a roughly chronological sequence,
ordered by when they graced my world.

From the years of my youth

The first time, ever, that I was shocked by the
death of a contemporary was that of Gene Kohfield, whom I met
in the Civil Air Patrol -- he was San Francisco's cadet
commander, and I was his adjutant, when we were about 16. We became
buddies, working together on a summer job (where he taught me how to
drive), and did a lot of 'hanging out' with each other, during those
wartime years, as kids do. In a very genuine sense, I owe one of my
nine lives to Gene's cool ability to set a small plane down, without
power, on a San Jose cabbage patch &endash; one frosty morning when
we were up together and the engine froze, after a stall maneuver that
I put it into. He was 17 at the time. Gene was big and raw-boned, and
flying was his entire world; I was quite certain he'd become an Air
Force version of George Patton, when he enlisted. But he was killed
in Korea, in a helicopter crash, and it was at a party, a few years
later, that I learned of it.

The brothers Hyman and Jack Bik come
next to mind, though I best knew them several years before the war.
They lived downstairs from us, in the stack of flats on McAllister
Street that I wrote about in issue #23. Hy was a half year older than
me, and I tracked him in classes from grade school through college,
though our "best friend" status didn't cover the full span. I got my
first deep friendship wound when Hy decided, about the time we
entered high school &endash; for reasons I never fully understood
&endash; to break it off. Not even Jack, several years older, could
account for it. We regained a civility with each other in college
&endash; by necessity, for we both worked on the college paper
&endash; but the onetime closeness we'd known was never regained.
It's not such a rare thing, as I've come to learn, but it was new to
me, and may have had a lot to do with the high value I put on
friendship, today: the stage of relatedness in which we willingly put
ourselves on a vulnerable footing, occasionally taken too lightly by
those whom we favor with the gift.

At any rate, both brothers faded from my life for
many years, until the early '80s, when I heard that Hy, who had
become a teacher and librarian in the old high school we'd once
attended, had died of lung cancer in his mid-50s. I made the effort,
then, to locate Jack and pay him a visit. It was a great few hours of
catch-up and reminiscence, and held a really unexpected bonus for me:
Jack still had an old home-made recording that the three of us had
done in 1939 -- a 3-minute wax disk with a scripted pastiche of corny
patter and bad singing, which I'd all but forgotten. He gave me a
taped copy of it, and we agreed to get together again in a few
months. But he never called me (as was the arrangement). More than a
year went by, and then by pure chance, I saw his name on the memorial
page of the U.C. alumni publication: a victim of lung cancer,
himself, after a short illness. Neither brother smoked, when we when
we were all young. But I did.

One more from my early years, with special meaning
for me: a seductive redhead named Reneé Laboure, who
was part of my college crowd of those days. I say seductive because
she just had that quality about her &endash; a lot of sex appeal, and
the usual shoddy treatment by men, that came with it. For in those
days (and has it changed all that much?) a woman was typecast by the
kind of sexuality she radiated. Reneé's singular toe-hold on
the ladder of fame is that she became the first wife of Pierre
Salinger, bore his first three kids, and was subsequently left
behind, as Pierre climbed his ladder of fame and eventually took
those kids from her. It never did her self-esteem much good, and so
I've a soft spot for Reneé. One day, long after I could
readily recognize her, I saw her from a San Francisco transit coach,
and thought, "what a remarkably good-looking woman!" By the time I
suddenly flashed to who it was, we'd gone too far for me to catch
her. So I paid a visit &endash; she was easy to find in a phone book
&endash; and it was one of the nicest in my long train of reunions.
But also the last time I would ever see her. I don't even recall
exactly what Reneé died of, or when . . . but it was after her
oldest boy had committed suicide close on the time of his university
graduation. May her sweet soul have found a better reward than she
ever had here.

Between my youth and the 'outlaw' years, which
began in my mid-40s, I didn't live in a world of friendships -- a
lifestyle tragedy of alienation that was not so uncommon in the
occupationally-focused society of my generation, though I think my
own instance was probably extreme. But I abandoned that world in the
summer of 1971, leaping headlong into a counter-culture fertile with
new possibilities. Within a few months, I was putting out a
publication called Black Bart...the Outlaw Mag ('zine' had not
yet come into vogue), from whence arose a community of like-minded
souls, a jestingly named Outlaw Institute, with inner-city
classes and country workshops, an urban Black Bart Center, and
all the resultant interweaving of lives that an alternative culture
can bring about. The 1960s are commonly assessed as the youth-focused
counter-culture years, but San Francisco sprouted a middle-aged
tailgate of it in the early 1970s, a true renaissance in many lives
otherwise gone or going to seed, and I was right there in the midst
of it, harvesting friendships with the zeal of a half-starved hobo
turned loose at a banquet.

The early Black Bart years:
1972-1974

The lady, Lou, who ran the post office at
Canyon, where my new life was nurtured, was at that time all the
generational ballast I had, to keep from feeling drowned in a sea of
youngsters and utterly lost from "my own kind" -- for I hadn't yet
found my new legs. I don't recall Lou's last name, nor exactly when
she departed, probably late in that decade, a victim of one of modern
life's scourges &endash; cancer, I think.

Among the earliest personal friends of my own
generation were Bill and Ruth, deep-dyed rebels even before I was.
And Ruth Kaysing, it was, who fought the long battle with
Parkinson's Disease, giving only inch by tenacious inch of ground,
over the final ten years, which ended not so very long ago. They were
(and still are, in my mind) an incredibly resourceful couple,
churning out book after book, on how to live simply enough to beat
the system -- the one of artifice and illusion, that we can
beat.

I remember taking leave of Canyon, like a
fledgling out to struggle with new flying skills. The game was to
network, and one of the first places that I connected with was
the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC), where
Marshall Palley held court in a pioneer project to lead people
toward an inner discovery of what they really wanted to do
with their lives, rather than just buy into the standard career
claptrap. I haven't the least doubt that there are many, many folks
around, approaching the millennium from some situation of personal
empowerment, who owe their first insight in that direction to the
work Marshall did, in laying a groundwork for that kind of
counselling. It was sometime in the '80s that I read of his passing
&endash; awhile after he'd retired from that post.

San Francisco's Black Bart Center, one of
many grassroots organizations that made use of AFSC techniques,
flourished for a few years in a first-floor apartment unit of the
city's first older generation collective-living cluster, the San
Jose House (named for the street it was on). One of the Center's
prime spark plugs, and a resident there as well, was Betty
Romanoff, also later instrumental in the start-up of what became
Berkeley's best known multi-age, collective residence, the
Hillegass House (my own later home for three great,
growth-filled years). Betty was an inexhaustible fount of bubbling
enthusiasm and energy, never too busy to encourage a project or
assist in its development -- yet, she somehow (and impossibly) saw
herself a shy and quiet soul. I last saw her during her terminal
illness, in the hospital, and she still effervesced . . . so that her
quite youthful death (50?) came as a double shock. I can't recall
exactly when, but around 1980.

John Hildreth was another memorable
resident in that San Jose House. A retired engineer, if memory
serves, he moved so totally and easily into a counter-culture mode
that his long, greying mane and the brilliant orange parachute canopy
over his bed inspired everyone who knew him toward their own
flamboyance of expression. My best image of him was doing a light
fantastic (remarkably lightly) on a moonlit San Francisco beach, to a
tune entirely in his own head. I cannot recall just when, or how, he
left us.

Networking remained the name of the game, and our
inner-city group linked and interacted with others, all over the
place. One strong connection was with a pair of Daly City
'alternativists,' JoAnne and Allen Lohse, who were into
fostering whatever aspect of community their outlying territory would
support: education, craft work, an alternative auto repair shop
&endash; Allen's special project, while JoAnne's was her abiding
interest in Celtic culture. Others floated into and out of their
lodging circle as the need arose. But in the early part of this
decade, they relocated to a country property in southern Oregon . . .
an ill-fated move, for they died together when the house burned, one
night, a couple years ago. A sharp reminder of how tentative this
life always is. I had last seen JoAnne when she visited here, hardly
a year before the fire. They were midway into their 50s.

A good friend of theirs, and mine, too, was Joe
Cooney. He was just your average sort of guy, unassuming, with a
heavy accent on friendliness, and a welcome guest for any occasion --
nothing more exceptional, except the fact that he was gay, but not in
any obvious or activist way. I really liked the guy, and never got to
see enough of him, sad to say. But I probably never could have. He
may be the only one I've known, to be taken by AIDS -- and young, of
course, sometime back in the '80s.

One further San Francisco networker, a real pro at
it, who seemed to have his hand in just about every activity of
consequence, inventing one or two of his own, was Gary Warne.
The element of surprise seemed at the heart of everything he did,
with ways of working it that invariably attracted attention. His
Gorilla Grotto bookstore, for example, and the group devoted
to doing outrageous things, just for the fun and excitement of it --
like a swift and sudden, early Sunday morning, naked "ride-in" on a
San Francis-co cable car. Gary's biggest surprise may have been his
decision to take the S.F. police exam. He passed the it, and became a
cop! (it still seems like I must have dreamt this). But no, I guess
the bigger surprise was the out-of-the-blue heart attack that took
him down, one day in the early '80s, after a morning jog. He was
still in his 30s, I'm sure.

I was involved in so much, myself, for those few
years up to the halfway mark of the '70s, that it's now hard to
separate the memories. We had use of a country camp called
Kilowana, up the side of Mt. St. Helena, and held a regular
series of workshops called Outlaw Weekends -- laid-back
affairs where anarchy was the reigning motif, and non-profit the
guiding rule of thumb. Group cooking, group hot-tubbing (invariably
in the buff), and group fun of every legitimate sort, all at minimal
cost. An old fellow named Myron Brazier, former hospital
administrator, retreaded (re-tired) as a woodcarver, turned a
perfectly situated leaning tree trunk, in a creekside glen, into an
elf, so that none should lack company who sat by the stream. He also
inscribed a memorable dictum of Black Bart, the highwayman, on a
timber that hung in the lodge for years: "Throw Down the Box".
Myron eventually removed to a cabin in the Canadian Okanogan, and
there entertained the peaceful death of old age, well into his 80s,
some years ago.

I associate, also, with Kilowana &endash;
though I visited her and Ray often in El Cerrito &endash; Esther
Redel, who succumbed to a long and agonizing battle with cancer,
sometime early in the '80s. She was a remarkable woman in many ways,
not least of which was something she did long before I ever knew her
-- a hitch-hike across the entire country, rare even today for a
woman, let alone in those pre-mid-century decades, when it was all
but unheard of. A kindred soul, indeed, that my spirit readily
recognized!

I guess my deepest personal loss, however, in the
death of a friend from those years, came with the passing of Chuck
Garrigues (whose name, as he'd always say, rhymes with
asparagus). One of our prime resource people in the Outlaw
Weekend events, during the early '70s, Chuck was also a housemate
of mine, for awhile, in one of my transitional moments, on terms that
were exceptionally provident for me. Even though regularly employed
as a psych tech at one of the local hospitals, he had always
been his own person, carving a place &endash; in a world of
conformity &endash; that perfectly suited himself. He radiated the
confidence of it without any least hint of a brag, like a boxer
radiates his punching ability. For the last decade, or so, of his
life, he facilitated one of the city's better known weekly hot-tub
'socials,' where he pursued his own design of the sybaritic Good Life
he aspired to, with the cheer and support of many members. Chuck died
of cancer early in the '90s, before he ever reached 60, if my
recollection is right -- a qualifier I have to add to all of these, I
guess.

The next ten years (1975 to
1984) &endash; incorporating my retreative
phase

Friendships didn't come as thick and fast, after
those bootstrap years, but with change still the motif of my life, it
never came to a dead stop, either (well, so to speak -- a poorly
chosen metaphor, for this issue). I was suddenly burdened with a
colostomy, and then blessed with a Berkeley retreat for a couple
years, followed by a year down in Carmel, and finally up to
Kilowana for four quite isolative years (the total being
seven, as you'll note &endash; a full cycle). The period ends with a
return to Berkeley in the early '80s.

The colostomy registers as my life's central
crisis, stealing the honor from the life-change that preceded it by
several years. A physical debacle, to begin with, it hit me at a
moment when I was virtually bereft of any financial resources, at
all. I hadn't even a place to live when I was released from the
hospital. Several friends came to my rescue, but the one I offer
special tribute to, here, was Dorothy Hill, who provided me a
room in her Berkeley cottage, in that summer of '75, for an absolute
pittance of rent -- which was covered by the local welfare
establishment and could have been more, had she wanted it. But
Dorothy, a veteran of Berkeley's anti-establishment crusades, lived
with an irreproachable sense of personal dignity and values. Well
into her 70s, at that time, with yet another decade of life ahead of
her, she put a portion of her meager Social Security income toward
the monthly support of a deprived waif in some third world country. I
honor her integrity and her ageless activism.

The last of my three years with that colostomy --
surely the most potent growth vehicle of my entire life -- was spent
in the idyllic seaside community of Carmel, living in a modestly (and
hastily) furnished garage of a charming old British expatriate named
Rose Page. Her first name had been cast aside in the course of
her life, and 'Page' was all anyone ever called her. She'd had a
stroke, and my assignment was just to be in residence, there, to make
sure everything was all right for her. I could come and go as I
pleased, and the arrangement was quid pro quo &endash; the
duty, for the rent. But the real cost to me was a piece of my heart,
for I couldn't be that much a part of her life and not halfway fall
in love with her. Don't get me wrong . . . Page was the soul of
British propriety and dignity, but possessed of such an irrepressible
spirit and spunk as to be irresistibly lovable. Nevermind that she
was several decades of life ahead of me, and known only for that
brief year, she remains my deepest personal loss of this period. Her
second stroke, midway through the year, left her unable to speak; but
my voice, and her eyes, did nicely from there on. The third stroke
killed her, almost exactly a year from the time I moved in. And I had
to move on . . .

To Kilowana, where I once more lucked into
a no-rent situation -- a cabin, as a member of the caretaking crew.
There had been a caretaker, of course &endash; 'old Bob'
Wells, so enfeebled with age, by this time, that he, too, needed
caretaking. We never had much interaction, he and I, and I was using
his AAA membership card, in 1980, on a cross-country car delivery to
Atlanta, when he died (at 89), and so I missed his funeral service,
too. But I have to honor old Bob for the timely gift of that card,
which eased me, and a black Marine Corps n.c.o. (out of uniform),
through a problematical highway incident in South Carolina. The
Marine had picked me up on the highway, after my Atlanta car
delivery, and we were headed for D.C. But his car broke down in the
middle of nowhere, well after midnight, and he had no recourse of his
own. I sallied forth, then, with that AAA card, in the star-lit but
otherwise solid black night, and foraged the help we needed. I think
old Bob could not have cared less . . . but this is just to let him
know.

I haven't even as clear a definition, in memory,
of the people I met during those years, as I do of the earlier
period. My journals would help, if only they were indexed. There was
Dorothy Legaretta, remarkably youthful for having brought up
&endash; was it seven children? &endash; who had a lovely home in the
Berkeley hills, where she held an annual party to welcome the return
of a magnificent wisteria that graced the entry archway . . . until
she was killed in an automobile accident, perhaps in the late '80s.
There was Peter Eckhard, a really strange fellow who wore all
his feelings on his sleeve -- to the point where it was hard for him
to hold onto good friends, but whose heart was as big as his frequent
blunders. He died fairly young, somewhere along the way, of something
I can't recall. And dear old Lillias, whose last name I'm sure
I once knew -- another ex-Britisher, and one of Page's caretakers and
friends, whose very recent death I learned of since I began doing
this issue! She and I once took a glorious hike in the woodsy hills
south of Carmel; and she misses the millennium by a bare few
months.

And then there were two on the eastern side of the
country, whom I knew mainly from the steady flow of newsletters they
sent out. Ellery Foster &endash; or as he called himself, El
Luckywalla &endash; who strove mightily at community efforts in
small-town Minnesota, until he fell victim to a hit-run driver. I
think he was close to 75, and we had only met once, briefly, on one
of my eastern forays. And from big-town Minnesota (Minneapolis),
Larry Johnson, also known as Ernest Mann, who pursued the
dream of a money-free society through an inexhaustible series of
Little Free Press newsletters, preserved now in several
self-published booklength collections, as well as an online archive.
Larry was killed just three years ago, in a violent argument with a
grandson. He was my own age, and we had connected several times, on
both ends of the country. Also in this category of east coast
luminaries, there was Mildred Loomis, who carried-on the torch
of Ralph Borsodi, a true pioneer in the world of economic
alternatives. I met both of them briefly (Borsodi still giving talks
in his 90s!), early in the '70s, and received occasional letters from
Mildred, over the decade, until she died &endash; of what, again, I
am not sure.

Somewhere along in this period was Barbara
Mullen, a writer who had turned out a lasting memorial to
herself, in a slim volume of sensitive prose and photos about
villages on California's northern shore, The Mendocino Coast
-- up to that time (1972), a largely ignored region. Around 1980,
Barb came down with cancer, and she was the first of several to
provide me with a realization of how utterly inept I am, at
interacting with someone who knows they are dying. Barbara never (to
my awareness) progressed beyond the stage of raging at the unfairness
of it all &endash; I think she was yet in her 50s. I'll have forever
etched in memory, the empty futility of that last effort I made, to
say goodbye.

I don't think of her without, at the same time,
recalling Jud Jerome, poet and writer of some national renown,
whom I only knew because of Barb's introductive ministrations. Jud,
just about my own age, had early-on documented some of the standout
communal efforts on the other side of the country -- he learned (and
conveyed) both the pros and cons from intensely personal experience,
and thus helped many others who were considering it, in those freshly
alternative years. He was also a poet of such incredible skill and
natural talent as I've ever read, and one of the very few whose works
I save and return to. I stayed with Jud and his wife for a few days
in 1985, when my road trip of that year took me through Yellow
Springs, Ohio. I learned of his death from cancer, while I was abroad
in 1991.

In Berkeley once again, and living at Hillegass
House toward the close of this period, I participated in a
standout ongoing group experience called Upward, that met
monthly and got down to the nitty-gritty on racial issues. A number
of the participants have since passed on, and two of them are
particularly on my mind, at this time. One was Sam Julty, a
fellow writer of unshakable convictions, who happened to be an
'expatriate' New York Jew, which tended to color most of his passions
&endash; certainly the way he expressed them. Sam was thereby the
spark for one of the most intense discussions the group ever had --
but that's another tale. At any rate, you could always count on
forthrightness from Sam, even if his views were somewhat askew of the
Bay Area's liberal sensibilities -- which was never so apparent as
when he briefly published a journal devoted to a male view of the
feminist movement &endash; a risky undertaking in any case, for a man
of his and my vintage. But his heart was in whatever he did, and his
independent voice has been missed since he took his leave, early in
the '90s.

My other Upward group friend, I didn't know
as well, but Isadora (Izzy) Lomhoff is memorable because she
died by suicide. She was young &endash; in her early 30s, perhaps
&endash; and it always seems to me the young have so much to
live for, because their world is still malleable, their horizons not
yet drained of possibilities. After all, I turned my own world around
at age 44. But we can only see ourselves from where we're at, and I
know very well the bleakness of an ill-starred fourth decade (one's
30s). I talked with Izzy privately only once or twice, and I could
feel that sense of hopelessness that was ravaging her. I later
thought that I might have somehow tried to be more responsive to her,
in a "what can we do together" way, for she wasn't unattractive to
me. But I was too busy, moving in other directions, at the
time.

So we come, finally, to . . .

My northwest years (1985 to the
present)

As I've probably said before, I never had any
thought of remaining in the northwest. I supposed it a brief,
pre-winter sojourn, in 1985. My visit was largely facilitated by that
summer's relocation of Danaan Parry and his
Earthstewards-Holyearth organization: they had use for my
editorial skills, and I, in turn, found temporary shelter with them.
I had already known Danaan for many years, and continued as his
newsletter editor until I left for Europe in 1990. The last time I
saw him, in fact, was at the first European Earthstewards
Gathering, the following year. His shockingly sudden death from a
heart attack, just a few years ago, while still in his 50s, left me
acutely aware of how little we ever know, of how little time may be
left to renew and revitiate our scattered friendships. This loss is
the one that hits the hardest, in this period. My best recollection
of Danaan, and it perfectly displays the quality that endeared him to
everyone, is the time he was giving a talk to a large assembly in
Seattle's central Unity Church, and I came in late, pushing a
wheelchair with my caretaking charge, Jean, disabled by MS, trying to
be as inconspicuous about it as possible. Danaan paused, practically
in mid-sentence, smiled over at me, and simply said, "Hiya, Irv."
What a guy!

Jean, by the way, was my ticket to a winter's
shelter and survival, that first year in Seattle, and has remained a
friend to this day. But her mother, Ruth Sturdevant, passed
away just last year, in her 80s, sadly leaving Jean &endash; now many
years in a nursing home &endash; without her central means of staying
in touch with a wider world. Ruth, very alive to the wider world, had
devoted her final decade to putting in a great deal of time with the
daughter who was handed such a difficult role to play, in this
world.

Just before I made my transition to Seattle, I
briefly knew a woman with the strange single name of Iama. I
met her at the first Earthstewards Gathering, in 1985, and
experienced one of those occasional sensations of instant connection,
with no sure or visible basis. I don't mean a 'romantic hit' &endash;
though it often grows from such beginnings &endash; just an immediate
'knowing' of some relatedness that is there. All that remains of it
is a postcard from her, illustrated with that well-known fragment of
Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel ceiling, that pictures God's
touch about to infuse Adam with life. Eerily, the postcard was
received after I'd already had word that Iama was killed when her car
went off the road, shortly after the Gathering. She was hardly more
than 40 years old. (Isn't it something to think about: how often
automobiles end up as hearses? Among the people I've known, cars have
been far more deadly than guns!)

I also owe to the Earthstewards connection my
friendship with Diane Gilman, co-founder of In Context
magazine. Diane died of a brain tumor at a tragically young age, just
a year or two ago. I never got to see her very often, but her charm
and uplifting warmth were such that each rare occasion was memorable.
The very last one, for me, was after Danaan's memorial
service.

Add one more recent victim of a brain tumor:
Mike Lomas, a friend from my university days. Mike was largely
responsible for generating a sense of community among older students
on campus, who typically find themselves outcasts from the usual
rah-rah energy of university undergrads. He was barely into his 50s
when life was taken from him, with frightening swiftness once the
process was underway.

The drumroll begins to feel morbid, as we move
through my more recent friends. But it's part of saying farewell to a
century, and I guess I'd rather express my griefs openly, than carry
them at a rankling interior depth, into the new times that lie ahead.
I appreciate your forbearance. There are not many more to account
for.

One that I couldn't possibly leave out was Jim
Hall, who once chided me, after reading something I'd written in
which I carelessly made reference to him as "old Jim." But he said to
me, one day, himself &endash; after realizing that he had no business
feeling ignored by young women, when he was up around 90 &endash; he
said, as if it were an agonizing discovery, "I'm just a fuckin'
old man!" But in the vigor of his views, he wasn't old at all.
Jim was my providential source of shelter, when I crossed the narrow
and swaying bridge of insolvency between 'old has-been' and freshly
funded undergrad, to begin my educational retread days. In return, I
made a point of visiting the sister he hadn't seen for decades, when
I got to Scotland a few years later. Each of them was excited to get
the personal message and two-way report I was able to convey. Jim
must have been at least 94 when he died, a couple years
ago.

During that half-year I spent in London, I made
two friends that can only be revisited in memory, now. One, that I've
talked about in these pages before, was Mike Clarke, an
astoundingly complex fellow whom I briefly stayed with while awaiting
more permanent quarters, and who subsequently closed off our
friendship, over some perceived slight, though I never got him to
speak of it. Yet, for me, it seemed one of the most meaningful
friendships of my entire journey &endash; very possibly at a karmic
level, for the odd synchroni-city that I described, both in my book
and in the Ripening Seasons of May 1997, which detailed my
return visit abroad. Those who read about it in that issue should
recall the second, even more amazing synchronicity, in my having
returned to London in precisely exact time (unknowingly) to attend a
memorial service for Mike. He was my age.

The other departed London friend was Dorothy
Urquhart, a charming, typically British woman (in wit, sparkle,
intellectual sophistication), also of my own vintage. Dorothy was my
favorite person to visit, on any inclement Saturday afternoon, which
is not such a rare occasion in a London winter. I was looking
forward, on my return, to another such call -- but she died before I
could manage it, alas, of cancer as far as I know.

In the interim between those two trips abroad,
that scourge, cancer, took another friend, who was much younger than
me. This was a rather unlikely friendship with an astrophysicist on
the academic roster at the university. I think Phil Peters
vicariously related to the free-thinking, free-wheeling aspect of my
being, which was such a contrast to his own staid and 'proper'
professorial path. But whether or not I gauged it correctly, I missed
the boat when I tried to provide some heartfelt counsel, on that
basis: Again, I failed to say the right thing, the supportive thing,
to someone who knew he was dying.

I never had the chance to blow it for my friend,
Earl Taylor, a burly old gentle guy who married a longtime
friend of mine, late in life. They had not many years together, but
good ones, in L.A., where they provided me with the 'decompression
chamber' that helped ease my re-entry into the country, seven years
ago, after 19 months in Europe. A turbulent, uncertain bout with
cancer began to take him down, not very long afterward, and I was
fortunately too far away to make it harder on him. Earl was a few
years older than me, and had been a smoker all his life.

And lastly, Mary Berry, of our small band
of outraged senior tenants, whose insistent questioning about a place
called the Morrison Hotel prodded me to do some digging that
ultimately exposed how the Housing Authority, here, had seriously
undercut the stability of a city program for seniors, which led to
reforms still underway. Mary died of multiple organ failure, before
she could see how her suspicions had been confirmed.

So there they are. Forty who travelled with me
through a portion of this fast-waning century. Forty, most of them
younger than me, and thereby &endash; on that account, at least
&endash; with a better likelihood of touching 2000 A.D. than I -- but
their destiny ruled otherwise.

Your lives, old friends of mine, do not go
unrecalled, your presence unspoken for. As well as is within my
power, the reality of you, as reflected in my experience of you, is
now taken &endash; if only in brevity &endash; into the 21st Century.
Friendship's final discharge.

I salute you, each and
all!

And a Special Centennial Tribute to: Mark
Milsk

For the last part of this extended recognition
issue, I want to celebrate an artist, for whom this is truly a
centennial -- she was born on November 15, 1899 &endash; the
calendar date that is my deadline for getting this issue done and in
the mail.

She is a forgotten artist &endash; despite much
local (San Francisco) recognition in the '30s and '40s &endash; whose
story I know only because she was my aunt. But I only knew a fragment
of her story, until some personal papers and artwork turned up among
my brother's effects. Included in the batch was the tattered old
remnant of a scrapbook, half its contents missing, but enough of it
left to reconstruct a story that blows me away. For I recognize, in
it, the antecedent to my own willful way in this world.

Yet, she never spoke of it, to me. Not that I saw
her that often, in the latter years of her life &endash; which ended
in 1982 &endash; but there were a few times it might have
happened.

As a youngster, I used to drop by her studio
residence when I was in that part of town. She lived and worked in
the old Montgomery Block, where that BankAmerica monstrosity now
stands, and thanks to those visits, I've a very good image of the
historic old interior, its simple, direct plan that puts modern
architecture to banal shame. But as I grew into my own full life, I
left old family connections in the dust. Not until the early '70s did
I again make contact, by which time her creative juices had ebbed,
and she eked out an income mainly from shops that sold her old scenic
San Francisco note cards.

I don't believe she even received an obituary
notice, when she died, though her work had often appeared in local
galleries and museums, and even as far afield as a pre-war exhibition
in Italy. But an interesting thing happened, about a year after her
death: I was suddenly inspired to experiment with left-hand
portraiture (seeing no connection, however, at the time), and I broke
through the barrier that had always kept my own artistic efforts
looking stiff and sterile.

I know, now, that I share a lot more than artistic
inclinations with my aunt Edith, whose professional name was Mark
Milsk (a derivative from my actual original family name).

Mark was my Dad's kid sister, by a year and a
half, both born in St. Paul, and when their father died in 1907, any
expectation of a settled childhood went out the window. The two of
them were out-and-about in their early teens, pretty much on their
own, and Mark gained some youthful experience with stage and circus
troupes in Wisconsin and Illinois. A theater act of some sort took
her to the west coast when she was 17, and again a couple years
later. So she was a seasoned traveller, in a sense, when she met
another adventure-eyed girl, as they picked cherries in a Vacaville
orchard. A friendship was struck, and they decided to travel together
to New York. But not in any ordinary way.

Lorlie (short for Lorline), on the left, was only
19, Mark &endash; or Beverly, her stage name at the time &endash; was
20, when they set forth from San Francisco on a bright May Day morn,
outfitted in a road-smart style, as the photo plainly shows. They
headed for Reno and then out across the Nevada desert, walking except
as they were offered rides! (so you see why I identify). The
newspaper clips indicate an encounter with deep snow drifts in the
Sierras, and two days without food while crossing Nevada. But they
were gutsy girls, and they stuck it out, picking up occasional work
along the way, to supplement their meager funds. Ogden and Salt Lake,
Cheyenne, Omaha, Minneapolis, Toledo . . . I've selected a clipping
from a Eau Claire, Wisconsin daily, for a reasonably readable
contemporary account of the road trip.

They reached New York City on September 18, and
what happened after that becomes a bit vague. In the backwash of
their celebrity status, the Pierce Bicycle Company offered to sponsor
a bike trip to Havana, and there are several photos showing our
intrepid wanderers setting out on it &endash; one of them with New
York's Mayor Hylan giving them a personal sendoff. But no clips of
that adventure beyond Elizabeth, N.J. My guess is that they found
bicycling a little more challenging than they'd bargained for, and
soon abandoned it.

But Mark's adventurous spirit was not yet
quenched. She must have returned to the west coast, and then wanted
to do it all over again, in 1922. She set out, this time, with
another partner, Angelin (Gypsy) Sommers, someone she had apparently
done some stage work with, in Hollywood, as they are referred to,
variously, as former Fox Sunshine Girls and Christy Comedy Girls.
They took a southern route, this time, and the trail is trackable
through Arizona and into Texas, but nothing beyond.

She ultimately returned to the west coast again,
where she became established, and remained active, in San Francisco's
bohemian art scene of the 1920s through the 1940s. Initially
publicized as the "Cowgirl Artist," for her rodeo scenes and portrait
work, her scope broadened toward sensitive ethnic studies in a
charcoal and conte style, pen and ink studies, and etching. Her work
was exhibited frequently in the late 1930s: Oakland and San Francisco
Annual Shows, Southern Printmakers, Pennsylvania Academy of Art,
Laguna Beach Art Assn., California Society of Etchers, Foundation of
Western Art, Palace of Legion of Honor (in S.F.), Seattle Art Museum,
De Young Museum, and more.

Her friendship with Lorline, her original
traveling partner, remained intact, as evidenced by photos into the
1930s. She did not marry until well into her 40s, and then it was to
encounter disappointment from an incompatible match. Ed Imperato was
a Merchant seaman, who seems to have floated in and out of her life,
both before and after marriage, and her notes indicate a high
frustration with his lack of social sensitivity and an overriding
passion for golf. She attributes her artistic decline to what she
"gave up" for marriage, but it seems more likely that it was a choice
she made: where to put her focus, and how much to submit to
distractions.

The only written record she left, of all this, is
a series of topical notes that seem to be an effort at autobiography.
But they were made very late in life, when she had trouble
maintaining a focus or getting beyond bare starts.

Seeing her in her late 70s, after a hiatus of many
years, was a bit of a startle for me, as she had come to resemble her
mother &endash; my grandmother, who had been dead for many years. It
didn't occur to me that I also probably looked very strange, to
her.